bassandafandomcom-20200214-history
A Meeting at the Museum
= A Meeting at the Museum = Lapin speaks I went with the Professor to the Musée d'Ethnographie in the old Trocadero Palace, west and across the Seine on the Right Bank. In the musty neglected halls dedicated to the folk arts of Oceania and Africa, amidst displays of primitive folklore and traditions—sculpture, clothing, artefacts—it was an environment whose colonialist unspecificity and indiscrimination I knew were anathema to him. In 1906, the Musée was not yet the haunt of Cubist and primitif artists like Picasso, who would shortly discover its collection of African masks, though the Fauvists like Matisse and Derain were beginning to evidence themselves. Nevertheless, we felt that this location was still less likely to elicit awkward chance-meetings with those who might know him, or us. The “Trocadero,” as the Museum was often known, was a curious place—it was one of the only remaining of the structures which had been built cheaply, of lath and plaster, for the 1878 Exposition Universelle. It was a horrid building, without heating or proper plumbing, but it did hold a vast trove of ill-sorted artefacts from all over l’Empire. I recall particularly the room stuffed with plaster, bronze, and wooden statues of west African and—so the Professor later told me—Caribbean gods. Poor gods! They had traveled far, both in miles and prestige, from the sites where they had been made and imbued with power. As we entered that chamber, across the space I spied the tall and striking figure of Madame Main-Smith, seemingly engrossed in her examination of a remarkable, almost caricatured full-size sculpture of the vodun God “Gou”, who held a club in one hand and a fierce-looking machete in the other. Rendered in what appeared to be sheets of riveted tin, he wore a long smock and a rakishly tilted hat decorated with its own small votive figures. Silhouetted against the angular form of Gou, backlit in the dimness by the slanting sun from a dirty overhead skylight, dressed in quiet dark clothes, conservative in design, avoiding attention, there was nevertheless an air of command about this woman which drew, for one who had experienced her in person, one’s immediate attention. Even as we entered the room, more than sixty feet away from Madame, to my right I heard the scuff of soft heels on marble, and before we had taken more than two steps forward a slender figure in dark plain clothes had slipped forward to contest our way. I recognized again the young man of eastern appearance who had taken charge of Madame’s hansom cab on the night of the Montparnasse fight, and I remembered his name. “Ca va, Ismail? You will recollect me, I hope, from the Colonel’s flat?” He looked back for a moment before speaking. He was olive-skinned and fine of feature, with an aquiline face and fine black hair. Despite the plainness of his dress—dark clothing, a pullover and loose trousers and soft shoes, lacking ornament or costly fabric, there was no mistaking the coiled strength of his body or the fierce energy in his penetrating eye. Addressing himself to me but looking at my companion, he said, “Oui, Mam’selle. I do remember you, but if the gentleman would be good enough to identify himself?” This query I momentarily regretted: accustomed as I was to the rather imperious ways of many of the Sorbonnais professors—and to my own Professor’s stringent expectations for intellect and reserved conduct—I was prepared for him to take umbrage at being thus interrogated. But he somehow surprised me, with the gentility, candor, and approachability of his demeanor; though he spoke in a language I didn’t know, I understood that he was introducing himself: “Bună ziua. Eu sunt profesorul James; numele meu este Habjar. Ești Ismail?” Ismail smiled suddenly, and I saw the youthful energy and enthusiasm that lurked behind the forbidding exterior: “Bună ziua, domnule profesor. Mi-am dorit să te cunosc. Sunt Ismail, iar eu sunt aici pentru a vă proteja și Madame. Și, desigur, Mam'selle Cecile.” At this the Professor shifted his umbrella and stepped forward, and they clasped right hands. He spoke in French: “I understand that you also are a chess aficionado—Is that correct? If so we must have a match.” Surprisingly, the young man appeared to flush lightly with pleasure. “Yes, m’sieu, I do play. I would welcome that opportunity, should such arise.” Madame spoke in English from close behind us—she moved almost as silently and subtly as did Ismail himself. “Habjar—it is so good to see you again, after this long time.” He took her extended fingertips and smiled into her eyes. “Yes, Algeria, it has been too long. And yet our reunion is perforce mandated by factors other than friendship or nostalgia, not so? Or so I understand from Cecile here.” I heard the Colonel’s voice, before I saw him step forward, from a dim corner behind and to the left of the door through which we had entered: “Yes, sir, Professor, I’m afraid that’s exactly the situation. Wisht it could be simply friendship that brung us to ye in person for the first time, but you know that’s not how it seems t’work with Friends of Bassanda.” The Professor, looking up at the looming presence of our frontiersman friend, clasped his left shoulder with one hand while they shook. “I know, Reverend Sir: it’s all right. Old friends, even if only by correspondence, can certainly make allowances for one another when they finally meet in person. I am happy to see you in Paris—though I understand other, less friendly hosts have already ‘welcomed’ you.” A match sputtered in the shadows behind the dusty case of the vodun idol Gou to our right, and the General’s ever-present cigar flared up, lighting his face from below. He shook out the match, broke it in two, and dropped it into his pocket, before doffing his kepi and coming forward to offer his hand in turn. He didn’t speak, but the Professor did: “General Landes. I have admired your scholarship in the Journal for decades, sir. Though I recognize the ivied halls were not your primary metier, I have appreciated your erudition and the catholicity of your academic interests.” The General smiled briefly—more with his eyes than lips—and nodded in appreciation. “Thankee, Doctor. As you’ve inferred, though, the task at hand is hardly academic. It’s a little more forbidding than a shoddy manuscript.” Astonishingly—in this conversation whose brevity, understated language, and elliptical nature I could only partly follow, and in contrast to most of what I had experienced of the Professor’s mien with peers and contemporaries—he chuckled quietly. “No sir, I do understand that. What was it our friend Mr Clemens said? ‘The reason academic battles are so ferocious is because the stakes are so small’?” The General nodded. “You’re right there, sir. In the present investigation, the stakes’re a little higher. And a lot more final.” The Professor nodded thoughtfully, cocked a critical eye toward Madame, and then said: “Well then, sirs, madame, mademoiselle: if we are agreed on the merit of further discussion regarding this journey of discovery or delivery, and now that we have all met in person, perhaps we might consider more hospitable and private environments?” A door slammed open at the other end of the room, echoing in the dim stillness of the hall, and a crowd of loud and animated young Left Bank aesthetes entered, talking excitedly; I recognized more than one among them who came from my own circle. The Colonel looked down the room, and then glanced quickly at the General, who nodded. “Time to adjourn, friends.” So while the Colonel led the way, and the General lingered behind with one eye upon the newcomers, the Professor offered his arm to Madame. Ismail put his hand lightly for a moment upon my wrist. “Mam’selle, if you will permit—there is another and a more discreet egress—if you will come this way.” We stepped through another, nearby door, which took us behind the lath-and-plaster walls of the hall, even mustier, dustier, dimmer and more stifling than the main rooms. As we sidled lightly, in single file, through the dimness of the back corridor that would take us out into the warm sunlight and fashionable beau monde of the Right Bank, Ismail preceded me to show the way. I was acutely conscious of the light, yet electric touch of his hand upon my forearm. [next in the 1906 sequence